Sunday, December 13, 2015

This is the first attempt at playing YouTube videos using POT and QtWebKit on Raspberry Pi 2 (Raspbian Jessie). I tried two ways: one is from the YouTube website and one is using the iframe YouTube API. What you'll see in the video is done using the old WebKit 1 in QtWebKit with the OpenGL paint engine. This is good if you need to place a YouTube video in your application. Unfortunately this is still very experimental and cannot be placed in QML applications. Much more work is needed for that.

Unfortunately what you'll see in the demo is just HD quality (720p). YouTube doesn't seem to be willing to let my Pi have the 1080p version for some reason.

Monday, December 7, 2015

There are a few solutions to get a browser with good performance on Raspberry Pi 2, but I wanted to test solutions that provide this to a Qt app on OpenGL without X11. The two main options I know are the "old" QtWebKit and the new QtWebEngine. I know that there are a couple of ways to use QtWebKit, one is with the first implementation, WebKit 1, the other is through WebKit 2. Also, it is possible to use WebKit 1 using the regular software raster paint engine and the OpenGL paint engine, which is the one I used in the previous article to implement the HTML5 video feature.
I therefore wanted to have a look at the performance of the animations (I'm not talking about WebGL here), so here it is; the video shows three samples (thanks to the authors!) run on each of these alternatives: WebKit 1 on raster, WebKit 1 on OpenGL, WebKit 2 and then QtWebEngine.

As you can see WebKit 1 on raster is completely unusable and WebKit 1 on OpenGL is clearly better, but still not very good. Also you can see how the pointer moves: the main thread is too busy and user interaction is difficult. WebKit 2 and QtWebEngine solve this issue and improve performance.